38, 8qq., 1 Cor. xv. 55, sqq., Heb. ii. 14, sqq.) His resurrection, which gives to His death its atoning power (Rom. iv. 25), is also the pledge of our resurrection and future life in Him, when He shall return to take His own to the joys of His Messianic kingdom. (1 Cor. xv.) Meanwhile we are assured, that in Him we have an Intercessor with God, who knows our need of help and forbearance, because He knows by experience the infirmity of our nature, with which He has clothed Himself, and in which He was 'tempted in all points, yet without sin.'" (Leben Jesu, vol. ii. p. 695-7.) Strauss goes on to argue, chiefly from Rom. i. 3, 4, viii. 34, 1 Tim. iii. 16, and the baptismal formula, that 'the Church of the early centuries' had abundant materials for constructing the so-called rule of faith' comprised eventually in the Apostles' Creed, of which the Incarnation-ő Xóyos σápå ¿yévεTO-was the groundwork, and that she was fully justified in excluding as they arose the successive heresies, from the Ebionite to the Monothelite, which directly or indirectly contradicted that faith. In his new Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet. Leipzig, 1864), addressed this time not to a learned but a popular audience, 'as Paul turned to the Gentiles when the Jews rejected his gospel,' the concluding Dissertation from which my extract is taken does not occur. But the Preface contains a general endorsement of the contents of the former work. The author still regards the Christology' of the Church-that is, the whole Christian doctrine of the Incarnate Word-as the product of several 'Groups of Myths' (twelve are here given, ranging from the Conception to the Ascension), whose formation must, however, be so far distinguished from that of the Greek, or rather Aryan, mythology as explained by recent writers, such as Professor Max Müller and the Rev. G. W. Cox, that they do not originate in observations of natural phenomena, but have a nucleus of historical fact. For the personal existence of Christ, which seemed to be left uncertain by the language of the earlier work (Introd. sect. 15) is here expressly affirmed, in accordance with Baur's system; though it is rather to the first Christian teachers, especially St. Paul, than to Himself that the form of religion which bears His name is to be attributed. There are few great men of history of whom we know so little as of Jesus' (p. 621). "The Christian Church in its earliest form, as it appears in the New Testament, was already the result of so many other factors besides the Person of Jesus, that any inference from it [i. e. from its belief] to Him is in the highest degree unsafe" (p. 623). "It may even be questioned whether, if He had re-appeared on earth about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) He would have recognized Himself in the Christ then preached in the Church" (p. 623). "Little of His real history can now be certainly ascertained; what is certain is, that those supernatural acts and events whereon the faith of the Church has principally fastened, never occurred at all."* Strauss admits, with Spinoza, that the Divine wisdom which is the eternal Son of God' was remarkably (in ausgezeichneter Weise) manifested in Jesus Christ'; but His example can only be considered a partial and one-sided model,† and the great work of future theology is to discriminate the ideal from the historical Christ,' and thus convert 'the religion of Christ into the religion of humanity' (pp. 624-26). Strauss hails in Renan a fellowlabourer in the same cause, with whose book his own 'shakes hands across the Rhine,' though he considers the Vie de Jésus by no means free from grave errors, especially, as we learn elsewhere (p. 37), in ascribing an undue and suicidal authority to the narrative portion of St. John's Gospel. The distinctions between the old Christianity, which the author desires to supplant, and the new religion to be substituted for it, are thus summarized in the Preface. "As long as Christianity is regarded as something given to mankind from without, Christ, as One come from heaven, His Church as an institution for the purification of men from sin through His Blood, the religion of the Spirit is itself unspiritually conceived of, and Christianity as Judaical. When it is understood, that in Christianity mankind has only become more deeply conscious of itself than before, that Jesus is only the man in whom this deeper consciousness first came forth, as a power deter * Has there not sometimes been a tendency among orthodox writers to dwell too exclusively on the miracles as proofs of power? They are surely represented in the Gospels primarily as exhibitions, so to say, of the character of God, as revelations of divine love. This is noticed, I believe, in the Bp. of Algiers' Ob. servations on Renan's book, which I only know, however, from extracts. Elsewhere (pp. 37, 38), it is argued at length, that so long as Christ is viewed as a mere man He cannot be held to represent the perfect ideal of humanity. The criticism is intended for Keim, a German writer, but has its obvious application to Renan also. I may add, that the charge of 'cold-bloodedness' brought against the first Leben Jesu is equally applicable to the second. It has none of that glow of sympathy which gives to the Vie de Jésus its seductive charm. It is not bread but a stone. mining His whole life and being, that we can only be cleansed from sin by entering into this idea, by taking it, as it were, into our own blood, then for the first time will Christianity be really understood in a Christian sense." (Pref. p. 18.) And again: "The constitution of the Church is only the form in which you preserve the contents of Christianity; and to know what form is best adapted for that purpose, you must know what it is you have in Christianity, whether it is something natural or supernatural. And you can so much the less leave this question undecided, because a supernatural religion with mysteries and means of grace brings with it as its legitimate sequel (folgerichtig) an order of priests standing over the community. He who wishes to get rid of the clergy from the Church, must first get rid of the supernatural (das Wunder) from religion" (ib. p. 19).* In the body of the work (pp. 575, 576), while of course denying that the Old Testament prophecies really refer to the death of Christ, as a death of atoning sacrifice' (eines sühnenden Opfertodes)—the sufferer spoken of being some pious contemporary or the 'collective servant of Jehovah'-Strauss expressly asserts, that such was nevertheless the belief, and the 'natural' belief, of the first converts from Judaism. On the whole then, I conceive, we shall not be wrong in assuming, that the view of Christianity, as a supernatural and sacramental religion, centred in the Person of a crucified and risen Lord, who 'was delivered for our sins,' as an atoning Sacrifice, and 'was raised for our justification,' to send down the Spirit who dwells in the Church and in its individual members as the Source of truth and grace, is still considered by Strauss a perfectly legitimate development, to say the least, of the Gospel preached within less than half a century of the death of Christ, and while His Apostles still ruled the Church: or, in other words, those who accept the Evangelical records of the life of Christ, and the comment on them contained in St. Paul's Epistles (or even in those four whose genuineness the Tübingen School does not dispute)† will find the Catholic creeds the most natural expression of their belief. *The italics are the author's. + Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians. CHAPTER IV. ST. ANSELM AND THE SCHOOLMEN. THE transition from the period we have been hitherto considering to the scholastic era is a more complete change than can easily be expressed. We seem to have passed from a world of realities to a world of abstractions, where the forms of language or of logic have taken the place of substantive ideas. The Fathers. stand to the Schoolmen something in the relation of Plato to the Alexandrian Neo-Platonists, or Aristotle to his Latin copyists of the days of the Empire. The very difference of name, 'Fathers' and 'Doctors,' serves to mark their difference of position. The whole patristic age was a life and death struggle with enemies of the faith, first with heathenism, then with heresy; it was no time for subtle distinctions, and ingenious outreasoning of artificial objections by equally artificial replies. The Fathers were engaged in building up and developing the fabric of Catholic dogma, chiefly on the Trinity and Incarnation, against opposite errors, and bringing home the truths of Christianity to the conscience and convictions of a corrupt but highly civilized world. Through the whole scholastic period there were no great doctrinal controversies. The Church's foes were of her own household, not the heretic or the sophist, but the fierce half-converted barbarian, or the mail-clad baron, who professed allegiance to her laws. The eleven general Councils, from the first of Lateran to that of Florence, were occupied with disciplinary questions, as of investitures, or healing the schism of the anti-popes, or suppressing the Templars, and only indirectly, when at all, concerned with doctrine, as in the discussion of the Double Procession and Purgatory at Florence, with a view to the reconciliation of the Greeks. The Schoolmen, accordingly, were not employed, like the Fathers, in elaborating and fixing particular dogmas, but in reducing the whole existing body of doctrine to what they considered a rational and consistent intellectual system. Their ambition was to construct a philosophy of belief. With a few like Abelaird, this meant testing the doctrines themselves by a philosophical standard, and accepting nothing as matter of belief which could not be comprehended by the reason. With the majority it meant educing from the received creed of the Church, illustrated latterly by the physical and metaphysical principles of Aristotle, and with the aid of definition and syllogism, a kind of cyclopædia of revealed and ethical truth. They wrote for the learned few, who alone could understand their language and method; whereas Sermons and Homilies held a prominent place in patristic literature. St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Leo were among the greatest preachers of the Church. The scholastic age, of which St. Anselm is the pioattained its zenith in the thirteenth century with the seraphic and angelic doctors, as they are called, neer, K |